material is obviously pixelated, and the colours

are what we might expect when we print our

holiday snaps on cheap copy paper using an
ink-jet printer. There is a fuzziness to many of
the images that stands in direct contrast to the
sharpness and precision of Xenakiss ideas.
Moreover, the size of the reproduced sketches
sometimes makes the written notes on them
partially indecipherable: they still function as il-
lustrations, but may prove frustrating for
readers with more than a musical amateurs
interest in the architectural and engineering
issues involved.
The poor standard of production is not just
limited to the illustrations. The book is littered
with typographical errors and mistakes, of
which the following are only some of the most
excruciating. In the list of abbreviations at the
books beginning, Le Corbusier is written as
Le Cobusier. On page 8, in one and the same
column, the piece Xenakis created for the
Pavilion is listed once as Concert PH (wrong)
and once as Concret PH (right). At one point,
avant-garde is written as as avant-guard while
at another the otherwise correctly titled
Gravesaner Blatter become the Gravesano Blatter
(p. 165). On page 76, at the bottom of a
column, the end of a sentence has simply dis-
appeared. Footnotes and footnote cues are
another source of frustration: page 152 has two
footnotes numbered 15, one of which is
referenced in the text as 16; on the next page,
the footnotes in the footer itself are listed as 7,
18, 9 instead of 17, 18, 19 like the corresponding
footnote cues in the main text. Finally, in Sven
Sterkens appendix, which even by the stand-
ards of the rest of the volume has an appalling
number of typing errors, Xenakiss own name
is at one point chopped down to nakis, while
on page 313, in a single and rather short
column, his daughters name is spelt variously
as Ma khi and Ma hki.
Presumably, costs were a major consideration
in the production of this volume and in one
way we should probably be grateful that this
important material has been made available at
what is a relatively low price. But at what cost
the low price? Expense has been the death
knell of many an architectural vision, including
several projects by Xenakis discussed in this
book. And though it is traditionally music that
is portrayed as a fleeting, temporal art, we can
still listen to the music Vare' se and Xenakis
created for the Philips Pavilion, but the
Pavilion itself is gone. Few of us will ever be
able to get a real sense of the space, scale, and
impact in their local settings of Xenakiss archi-
tectural works, not to mention his Polytopes.
Thus, this reviewer can only conclude with a
plea for a new, deluxe edition, with larger and
legible illustrations on photo-quality paper, a
professionally proofread text, clearer organiza-
tionin short, an edition that really would
provide a lasting and inspiring testimony to
Xenakiss dual musical and architectural
genius.
M. J. GRANT
Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen
doi:10.1093/ml/gcq046
Listening. By Jean-Luc Nancy. Trans. by Char-
lotte Mandell. pp. xiv 85. (Fordham Uni-
versity Press, New York, 2007, $16. ISBN
978-0-8232-2773-0.)
Listening is a short but significant contribution
to the Continental philosophy of music by one
of Frances leading thinkers. Dense and poetic,
its prose is grounded in the rich post-
phenomenological tradition, and this volume
sets itself a challenging twofold task: to reunite
sensation and understanding in the figure of lis-
tening, and to restore timbre (as resonance)
back to its pride of place within the musical
event.
The title essay, Listening, begins with the
question of philosophys limitations: whether it
can approach listening in an appropriate
manner: Is listening something of which phil-
osophy is capable? Or . . . hasnt philosophy
superimposed upon listening, beforehand and
of necessity, or else substituted for listening,
something else that might be more on the order
of understanding? (p. 1). Given that Between
sight and hearing there is no reciprocity
(p. 10), Nancy develops an argument comparing
the simultaneity of the visible and the contempor-
aneity of the audible (p. 16): the fact that
sonorous presence is an essentially mobile at
the same time (p. 16), and that in the case of
the ear, is there withdrawal and turning
inward, a making resonant, but, in the case of
the eye, there is manifestation and display, a
making evident (p. 3). The following extrapola-
tion is key: the visual is tendentially mimetic,
and the sonorous tendentially methexic (that
is, having to do with participation, sharing, or
contagion), which does not mean that these
tendencies do not interact (p. 10). Contagion
is an important mechanism for resonance, for
it allows Nancy to enter the following phenom-
enology of sonority: The sonorous, on the
other hand, outweighs form. It does not
467
dissolve it, but rather enlarges it; it gives it an
amplitude, a density, and a vibration or undula-
tion whose outline never does anything but
approach. The visual persists until its disap-
pearance; the sonorous appears and fades away
into its permanence (p. 2).
Considering the opposition of sense and
truth, Nancy asks, shouldnt truth itself . . . be
listened to rather than seen? (p. 4). Pursuing
the notion that truth is emergent as sonority,
Nancy frames his trajectory with a note on the
type of philosophical attitude he is trying to
open up: Here we want to prick up the philosophic-
al ear (p. 3), and this is because To listen is
tendre loreilleliterally, to stretch the earan
expression that evokes a singular mobility,
among the sensory apparatuses, of the pinna of
the earit is an intensification and a concern,
a curiosity or an anxiety (p. 5). Nancy
expands this point with reference to the etymol-
ogy of ecouter back through its roots in auris and
auscultare. The point of lending, stretching, and
straining the ear is less what presents itself to
viewform, idea, painting, representation,
aspect, phenomenon, composition, and more
what arises instead in accent, tone, timbre, res-
onance, and sound (p. 3). A superficial, and
largely correct, reading of this point notes that
this is a turn from structure to meaning, from
what sonorous presence expresses to what it
affords. It is also something more: a significant
turn away from transcendental phenomenology
towards a qualitatively different mode of
thought. Indeed, whether it is a mode of
thought that is sought in the turn from repre-
sentation and phenomenon is itself part of the
question.
Having asked if truth should be listened to,
Nancy asks a related, ontological question:
What does it mean for a being to be immersed
entirely in listening, formed by listening, or in
listening, listening with all his being? (p. 4);
What does it mean to exist according to listen-
ing, for it and through it? (p. 5). At this point,
Nancy begins to articulate his own contribution:
the sound that is musically listened to, that is
gathered and scrutinized for itself, not,
however as an acoustic phenomenon (or not
merely as one) but as a resonant meaning, a
meaning whose sense is supposed to be found in
resonance, and only in resonance (p. 7).
Taking up the notion of straining towards the
listening object, he develops a phenomenology
of listening intention (noting caveats about the
very concept of intention) with implications for
the direction of the subject and its constitution
as, and in relation to, listening: To be listening
is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in
an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the
sound were precisely nothing else than this
edge, this fringe, this margin (p. 7). Ultimately,
according to Nancy, it must be argued that
A self is nothing other than a form or function
of referral: a self is made of a relation to self, or
of a presence to self (p. 8). In this sense, it is
worth noting the grammar of the frequent
phrase To be listening is to be x, by which
being is phrased in terms of its ontological con-
stitution as listening: to be listening as in to be
old or to be a musician alongside the more
obvious to be currently engaged in the activity
of listening. The lesson is that listening is a
question of being: listening . . . can and must
appear to us not as a metaphor for access to
self, but as the reality of this access, a reality
consequently indissociably mine and other,
singular and plural, as much as it is
material and spiritual and signifying and
a-signifying (p. 12).
Nancy describes the kind of self towards
which listening strains: When one is listening,
one is on the lookout for a subject, something
(itself) that identifies itself by resonating from
self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside
of itself, at once the same as and other than
itself (p. 9). He comes close to articulating
a proto-sociology of musical subjectivity,
articulating it as a kind of pathologyisnt
sense first of all, every time, a crisis of self ?
(p. 9)in which the singularity of sonorous
presence (p. 10, et passim) is both what drives
the subject towards itself (referral) and divides
or separates it from itself (resonance). Indeed,
for Nancy, the significance of this is that it
shows how listening is paradigmatic of the
subject and an essential constituent of subjectiv-
ity: Listening thus forms the perceptible singu-
larity that bears in the most ostensive way the
perceptible or sensitive (aisthetic) condition as
such: the sharing of an inside/outside, division
and participation, de-connection and conta-
gion (p. 14). The point is also not just that lis-
tening is a matter of ethics, but that it is an
ontological issue concerning the sense of the
world. Indeed, the issue lies above and beyond
secondary debates about the role of Music
(which is, after all, only one way of
appropriating and channelling listening) in
such secondary matters as self-expression and
social identity.
The reality of this access is a matter of
sonorous time, and sonorous time takes place
immediately according to a completely differ-
ent dimension, which is not that of simple suc-
468
cession (corollary of the negative instant). It is a
present in waves on a swell, not in a point on a
line; it is a time that opens up, that is hollowed
out, that is enlarged or ramified, that envelops
or separates, that becomes or is turned into a
loop, that stretches out or contracts, and so on
(p. 13). There is a question here about whether
the surprise of sonorous presence presents a
problem for the subject. As resonance is set in
motion, and the subject summoned into some
form of proto-being, how does the subject cope
with the rhythmic rise and fall of resonance?
Rhythm, Nancy writes, is nothing other than
the time of time, the vibration of time itself in
the stroke of a present that presents itself by
separating it from itself, freeing it from its
simple stanza to make it into scansion (rise,
raising of the foot that beats) and cadence (fall,
passage into the pause). Thus, rhythm separates
the succession of the linearity of the sequence
or length of time: it bends time to give it to
time itself, and it is in this way that it folds and
unfolds a self (p. 17). Temporality, moreover,
defines the subject as what separates itself, not
only from the other or from the pure there,
but also from self (p. 17). Nancy is ambivalent
as to whether or not this separation, this
rhythmic division of the self from itself, is plea-
surable, painful, traumatic, or a crisis (p. 9),
especially given his comment elsewhere that
the intimacy of music is an intimacy more
intimate than any evocation or any invocation
(p. 59) and his insistence throughout Listening
that resonance is a matter, not of listening style
(over which the subject may exercise choice),
but of fundamental ontology (through which
the subject is chosen). The question is twofold:
first, whether an underlying or primal event of
separation with that kind of tone motivates lis-
tening (listening for fear of losing the self,
perhaps); and second, whether attending and
concentrating the mind (i.e. one side of listen-
ing) is not only a necessary response to
sonorous presence and a mode of emergent
activity, but itself a creative act of making
sense both of and in the worldchanging,
bending, manipulating, and transforming time,
and thus difficult and sometimes stressful.
Nancy draws together arguments about the
arrival of sonorous presence and about the
self-separation of the subject in order to draw
a line under standard phenomenological
accounts of the subject and temporality (pp.
18^22, 28^30), and to draw out both the transi-
tive sense of etre and a non-intentional concep-
tion of subjectivity. He proposes that music (or
even sound in general) is not exactly a phenom-
enon; that is to say, it does not stem from a
logic of manifestation. It stems from a different
logic, which would have to be called evocation,
but in this precise sense: while manifestation
brings presence to light, evocation summons
(convokes, invokes) presence to itself (p. 20).
This has important implications for the
question of the subject and subjectivity. It is a
question, then, of going back from the phenom-
enological subject, an intentional line of sight,
to a resonant subject. . . .The subject of the lis-
tening or the subject who is listening . . . is not
a phenomenological subject (p. 21), and is
subject less to a criterion of cognitive consis-
tency than to a certain poetic consistency that
affords the aesthetic the opportunity to deter-
mine the specific details of the resonance, its
precise timbre and affective quality. Alongside
intention, sound is what places its subject,
which has not preceded it with an aim, in
tension, or under tension (p. 20); indeed, there
is only a subject . . .that resounds, responding
to a momentum, a summons, a convocation of
sense (p. 30).
For Nancy, musical listening is like the per-
mission, the elaboration, and the intensification
of the keenest disposition of the auditory
sense (pp. 26^7); it is the paradigmatic usage
of the ears. Meaning, sense, and direction
begin, not with intention, but with listening,
with the resounding return of resonance;
indeed, Sense reaches me long before it leaves
me, even though it reaches me only by leaving
in the same moment (p. 30; cf. p. 20).
At this point, Nancy introduces the concept of
timbre, which he places at the centre of listen-
ing: the first consistency of sonorous sense as
such (p. 40). By first Nancy means that
Rather than speaking of timbre and listening
in terms of intentional aim, it is necessary to
say that before any relationship to object, listen-
ing opens up in timbre (p. 40); he also could
be taken to mean that the first event of and in
listening (the passing of aspect perception) is
timbral in nature. According to Nancy, reso-
nance is at once listening to timbre and the
timbre of listening (p. 40); Timbre is the reso-
nance of sound: or sound itself (p. 40). By this
he means that timbre becomes a sharing that
becomes subject (p. 41), and is thus the begin-
nings of the echo of the subject (p. 39). While,
as he says, there is obviously no sound without
timbre (pp. 39^40), his interest is in the possibil-
ity of timbre without sound, by which he
means before sound. Nancy expands on the
fact that Timbre is above all the unity of a
diversity that its unity does not absorb (p. 41),
469
an emergent property of music, singular in
quality and multiple in composition. This is
why, as Nancy notes, timbre draws music into
other perceptible registers (p. 42), namely the
metaphors associated with and coming from
other modalities and senses. It draws music
into the wider world (p. 84 n. 36).
This might be taken to be the heart of
Nancys argument: the irruption of ethics into
aesthetics. Nancy says: I would say that timbre
is communication of the incommunicable:
provided that it is understood that the incom-
municable is nothing other, in a perfectly
logical way, than communication itself (p. 40).
Indeed, it should be noted that Nancy writes,
in words hinting at the opening of a community
and thence a sociology of music listeners, that
sonorous presence is a place-of-its-own-self, a
place as relation to self, as the taking-place of a
self, a vibrant place as the diapason of a subject
or, better, as a diapason-subject. (The subject,
a diapason? Each subject, a differently tuned
diapason? Tuned to selfbut without a known
frequency?) (pp. 16^17).
The second and third essays in Listening are
much shorter than the first. March in Spirit in
Our Ranks makes a historical point. After a
prologue referring to Nietzsches Bizet, Nancy
states: not only did Nazism treat and mistreat
in its way the musical art it found before it . . . ;
but Nazism also benefited from an encounter,
which was not a chance one, with a certain
musical disposition, just as it also benefited
from a similar encounter with a certain new
condition, often the most modern, of dance and
of architecture (p. 50). Nancy describes music
as an art of expansion, and as dangerously
implicated in the propagation of a subjectivity
(p. 51). This darker side to the obsession with
musical subjectivity and subject position
provides him with a clue to the ways in which
subjectivity is historically determined and con-
tingent upon particular ideologies, the narra-
tive of which he describes as follows:
conquest transforms its schema in a radical
way: mastery of a territory (one that is rela-
tively indifferent to the capture of souls), and
even the submission and domination of popula-
tions, are followed by the capture and penetra-
tion of identities. Capture gives way to control,
absorption to administration, penetration to
simple jurisdiction (p. 52). Nancy notes
Goebbelss comment that Art is nothing other
than what shapes feeling. It comes from feeling
and not from intelligence (quoted on p. 56), in
order to argue that if this is the case, then the
problem is that the operation [of forming
communities around and upon music] passes
through music (or any art) and over it: the
direction that forms it is added to it as a
finality that music itself does not have. The inef-
fable is charged with speaking (pp. 56^7). This
creates impossible demands for justice in which
feelings cannot be spoken of without being
silenced or betrayed. Nancy concludes the essay
by remarking that What truly betrays music
and diverts or perverts the movement of its
modern history is the extent to which it is
indexed to a mode of signification and not to a
mode of sensibility. Or else the extent to which
a signification overlays and captures a sensibil-
ity (p. 57), and ignores its resonance.
The third essay, How Music Listens to
Itself , reads like a refraction of the argument
in Listening. Nancy starts with a straw man
position: somebody who listens without
knowing anything about itas we say of those
who have no knowledge of musicology (p. 63).
The rhetoric is couched in negative terms, and
it would be useful to develop the mirror image
of this description, namely a sense of what the
non-specialist listener does (rather than does
not) and is (rather than is not). The straw man
position adopted by Nancy generates, almost
automatically, a series of oppositions or differ-
ences, which he works over towards a feeling
for the aesthetic work they might produce.
Thus, for example, Nancy writes that musical
listening allows one to link sensory apprehen-
sion to analysis of composition and execution
(p. 63), while a little further on he asks, How
are the musicianly and the musical shared or
intermingled? (p. 64), describing the pair as a
technical apprehension and a sensory apprehen-
sion (p. 64). Nancys conclusion is reasonable:
musical listening worthy of that name can
consist only in a correct combination of the
two approaches or of the two dispositions, the
compositional and the sensory (pp. 63^4).
In summary, Listening is a careful working
through of the ears essential mechanisms
that unfolds alongside the errors of post-
Enlightenment Western thought and opens up
new soundscapes for listening. Along the way,
it affords a new form of subject phrase in the
resonance of feelings and their linkages, and
shows how resonance articulates feeling, how
feelings become phrases, and how articulating
phraseslisteningmight actually be ethical,
prudent, and sensitive to the event. Like
Andrew Bowies magisterial Music, Philosophy,
and Modernity (Cambridge, 2007; reviewed by
James Garratt in this volume, p. 429), though in
a quite different register, it demonstrates that
470
music has a thing or two to teach us, whether
we are philosophers, musicians, both, or neither.
ANTHONY GRITTEN
Middlesex University
doi:10.1093/ml/gcq035
The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of
Rock Albums. By Carys Wyn Jones. pp.
xii 169. Ashgate Popular and Folk Music
Series. (Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington,
Vt., 2008, 50. ISBN 978-0-7546-6244-0.)
Talking to The Guardian newspaper in 2002, the
poet and critic Tom Paulin complained about
A-level, the British school-leaving examination
that prepares for university: I think A-level
History is still a very good subject, but English
is very watery now. Alan Bennett is on the cur-
riculum, for fucks sake! Imagine giving an
18-year-old Alan Bennetts monologues. From
such tiny seeds do canons grow: taste strutting
around as value, highbrow sneering at
best-selling author much admired, and the
public, national playground of school, with its
door-opening qualifications, student numbers
by the busload, bonanza sales for authors who
luck out. The Rock Canon plunges energetically
into these watery waters, figuring how
so-called popular music finds itself saddled
with an idea lumbered with the baggage of
English literature and so-called classical music.
The Rock Canon was Carys Wyn Joness
doctoral thesis at Cardiff, where her daily work
centred on ten records and the critical writing
around them. The choice of albums matters a
lot, and is mostly the hundred greatest albums
ever made as voted by critics for Dadrock
magazine Mojo in August 1995, corroborated
by statistician Henrik Franzon (pp. 26^7).
Alongside the writing specific to the albums,
including single-author monographs, reference
is made to other commentaries: essays in The
Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll,
for example, or, with curious frequency, John
Lennons 1970 interview with Jann Wenner for
Rolling Stone magazine. All this is of great
interest for those about to rock, as Brian
Johnson would say, but perhaps few besides.
However, another cluster of literature presents
the material alongside debates in musicology
referring to classical music, writers such as
Joseph Kerman, Marcia Citron, and William
Weber, and edited collections Disciplining Music
(1992) and The Musical Work (2000). Finally, a
first chapter brings on debates around the
canon in literary studies, writers such as
Harold Bloom, Frank Kermode, Barbara
Herrnstein Smith, and John Guillory, both his
useful article in Critical Terms for Literary Study
(1990) and impenetrable book, Cultural Capital
(1993). Thus The Rock Canon should prove useful
both for courses limited to popular music, and
for courses in musicology that aim to take a
broad or long view; it is also a subject of intrin-
sic and general interest.
The first chapter, Defining the canon, is a
handy summary recommended for students
working to an essay deadline and teachers
looking for a rapid seminar fix. Over the fol-
lowing three chapters, the ten albums and their
critics take centre-stage, as Wyn Jones looks for
aspects of canon formation in rock music
similar to and different from those of literature
or classical music. Among many others, useful
and interesting topics include genius, art, influ-
ence, the test of time, romantic myths of creativ-
ity, and list-making. A fifth chapter examines
the relationship between what Clive James
termed the metropolitan critic and writers
based in universities (Tom Paulin straddles
both). The final chapter betrays its roots in
academic examination, with unnecessarily
tepid conclusions, such as: there is a case for
and against a canon in rock music (p. 139)
andsomething so winsome Princess Di might
have said ithaving a canon of albums might
ultimately be a matter of individual perception
(p. 139). We dont really find out what Wyn
Jones thinks; right-on enough to declare canon
to be inherently elitist (p. 25), and temporary,
contingent, and subjective (p. 15), but good-
girl enough to insist that a field without
categories is simply a mess (p. 140). Consider-
able time and effort may have gone in establish-
ing only something non-contentious from the
start: when asked, and as part of the job, critics
postulate, parade, police, and pooh-pooh histor-
ically transcendent value judgements. Its inter-
esting and salutary to learn that writers on
Anglo-American rock music use ideas similar
to those used of classical and romantic music,
and The Rock Canon is, if nothing else, a
splendid digest of hacks trembling before their
favourite records: the prize goes to Amy
Raphael on the Stone Roses (what we are left
with is the art, the music, p. 97). This aspect is
often expertly done: see the eagle eye for the
slack use of quantum leap (at p. 59), or Patti
Smiths use of the word canonizing on the
sleeve-note of Horses (at p. 76). Readers might
want to read Wyn Jones and her critics along-
side an underrated book, Robert Pattisons The
471